Economists: Ending NAFTA would severely hurt U.S. farmers

The demise of the North Am­er­ican Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), if it occurs, would deal a serious blow to the already weakened farm and rural economies in Iowa and other Midwestern states, agricultural economists said last week at a conference on exports held by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

And the future of NAFTA, the economists warned, is very cloudy. There is a growing possibility that the current NAFTA negotiations will fail to produce a revised agreement and that the United States will begin to pull out of the 23-year-old trade pact, they said.